Today's enterprise data centers and high performance computing environments are constantly looking for ways to optimize computing resources and reduce their total operating costs. One way in which they accomplish this is by regularly modifying the host-to-volume mapping configurations in a storage system. In a SAN storage system, volume-to-host mapping (also known as LUN [logical unit number] masking, selective presentation or storage partitions) is a technique that allows a host or hosts to see only a specified set of logical volumes in a storage system. This mapping is necessary for data integrity, volume access control, storage virtualization and consolidation, fault isolation, and data protection from accidental deletion of data. Modification of volume-to-host mapping is done to allow the organization to implement computer server repartitioning (moving servers from a low workload server group to a heavy workload group), server repurpose (reallocating a server used for one purpose for another purpose), disaster recovery, and other business activities.
The conventional approach to this problem, with the existing technologies of a storage system, is for a storage administrator to manually modify mapping configuration through a GUI management application or through a command line interface application of a storage system. In order for the process to be automated, script files of command line interface must be created. If N mapping configurations are designed, N! (N factorial) script files are required. If three mapping configurations are designed, six script files would have to be created (to modify mapping configuration from: implementation one to implementation two, implementation two to implementation one, implementation one to implementation three, implementation three to implementation one, implementation two to implementation three, and implementation three to implementation one). For 5 mapping configurations 120 script files are required. Each script file must be manually generated with the content of deleting and creating host-volume-LUN mappings. If a configuration is re-designed, the script files must be recreated. Managing and testing large numbers of script files is a challenging and difficult task.
Thus, it would be desirable to provide an easy and reliable method and software for modification of host-to-volume mappings in a storage system.